Ultimate Tag Warrior Breaks WordPress Search

Ultimate Tag Warrior Breaks WordPress Search

I think Ultimate Tag Warrior is one of the most useful WordPress plugins available for Serach Engine Optimization. For those who are familiar, it allows authors to add descriptive tags (keywords), helping search engines categorize the content and ultimately increasing site traffic. This feature is so useful that there are a bunch of people who believe it should be incorporated into the core of WordPress. Unfortunately, to be so popular, I find it surprising that the two latest versions are causing serious problems with the WordPress search feature.

Versions 3.1415926 and 3.14159265 have incorrect table joins in the search function. So, if a post (or page) doesn’t have tags, it will not be returned in the search result. My site had this problem for at least a couple of months before I accidentally discovered it. I spent the next hour troubleshooting, thinking I had plugin conflicts. Turns out, it was just a problem with UTW — one that was reported about 2 months ago in UTW forum and still hasn’t been fixed.

This is a great plugin but it needs to be “open-sourced” so multiple authors can contribute to the project and push future releases. I tried fixing the code in latest version but became frustrated, gave up, and deactivated UTW. So I’m tagless for now and hoping for a new release to resolve the issue.